A great song by Steely Dan

I heard this song this morning, one of my all-time favorites--Deacon Blues--a phenomenal song by Steely Dan. The lyrics are pure poetry. As someone who writes poetry, I take my hat off and acknowledge ‘best in class’. “I crawl like a viper through these suburban streets; Make love to these women, languid and bittersweet.” And the end of the song—“I cried when I wrote this song, sue me if I play too long; This brother is free, I'll be what I want to be”. And finally, "I want a name when I lose". You can just imagine them writing and living the song—taking their experiences and weaving them into a song that perfectly captures what they’ve experienced. Wonderfully inspired and nothing I could write here could do these lyrics justice—they’re perfect (at least to me), as is the rest of the song. It’s interesting to read about the different sources of inspiration for Steely Dan on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacon_Blues).

I grew up listening to Steely Dan’s music, but never got a chance to see them in concert before the year 2000, when they played at the Oslo Spektrum concert arena. And what a terrific concert that was. Their music has aged well, considering that the song Deacon Blues is from the 1977 album Aja. Listening to their music was not just a trip down memory lane. Their music and lyrics are as relevant now as they were when they first appeared. You can find the song on YouTube, as always. Here is one link to the song:

Deacon Blues

This is the day
Of the expanding man
That shape is my shade
There where I used to stand
It seems like only yesterday
I gazed through the glass
At ramblers
Wild gamblers
That's all in the past

You call me a fool
You say it's a crazy scheme
This one's for real
I already bought the dream
So useless to ask me why
Throw a kiss and say goodbye
I'll make it this time
I'm ready to cross that fine line

CHORUS:
I'll learn to work the saxophone
I'll play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whisky all night long
And die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

My back to the wall
A victim of laughing chance
This is for me
The essence of true romance
Sharing the things we know and love
With those of my kind
Libations
Sensations
That stagger the mind

I crawl like a viper
Through these suburban streets
Make love to these women
Languid and bittersweet
I'll rise when the sun goes down
Cover every game in town
A world of my own
I'll make it my home sweet home

CHORUS

This is the night
Of the expanding the man
I take one last drag
As I approach the stand
I cried when I wrote this song
Sue me if I play too long
This brother is free
I'll be what I want to be

CHORUS

A useful website--Views and News from Norway

http://www.newsinenglish.no/

A very interesting little website--Norwegian news stories translated to English, for those of you who might want to read what is going on in this country.

Progress report

I don’t know what I would do without all the faceless bureaucrats and administrators to keep me in line at work. They’re just unknown names to me--anonymous. They send out their numerous emails and reminder emails to look at the first emails and all I can think of is—thank God someone is watching over me. What would I do without them? They remind me to fill out this or that progress report, to download this or that form, and I wonder how I survived and managed ten years ago without all this ‘follow-up’. I guess some of it is good and even necessary. But the amount of email I get now is incredible—too much in other words—and the amount of regular post has dwindled to nothing. I check the regular mailbox I have at work and it is nearly always empty. I wonder how the post office survives these days. I wonder how come postal workers are not being laid off in record numbers. The same is true for home mail; I get very little mail and I miss it. I used to like opening the mailbox and seeing cards and letters from friends and family, as well as the occasional advertisements and catalogs. It was something to look forward to. I guess it’s cheaper for clothing stores and electronics stores to send emails with attachments, but I don’t see the savings passed on to us, the customers. I’m waiting for that day.

But back to my emails. Today was one of those Mondays that started well. I decided to focus on my work—on a lecture that I am preparing. I was actually gaining momentum and getting into it, when suddenly I remembered the email from last Thursday, reminding me to fill out and send in a progress report having to do with how I have spent the twelve thousand dollars in grant support for consumables that was awarded me in December 2010. This is how the grant application process proceeded last year. I wrote the grant in May, sent it to the granting agency in June and it came back with a reply in December. The money was transferred to my hospital account in January 2011. The granting agency wants to know how I have spent twelve thousand dollars in the space of two to three months. I have stretched this amount of money to last up to one year many times before, because it’s not often one gets grant support of any kind. So it’s highly unlikely that I would have used it up already. So I wrote this on my progress report. I was honest. I wrote that my work was dependent upon this particular sum of money and that since it was just made available to me in January of this year, that I have not had a chance to spend it, which is true, because I have been busy planning and designing the experiments that will require purchase of specific reagents to complete them. So I found it almost amusing that they wanted me to report on my progress already. I would have thought it sufficient to ask how I was doing in August or September. Then I might have been able to tell them that my experiments were going well or that they were going to hell. One or the other. Additionally, ordering necessary items has become a lengthy process, so that it is also unlikely that I could have ordered everything I needed in the space of a couple of months. So this is my progress report anno 2011.

I have to wonder what happens to all the progress reports. Who keeps track of them, and who reads them? Do they get stapled to your file and get perused by the grant reviewers who will look at all the new grant applications this year? Will they appreciate my honesty, or will they think I’m playing a game with them? I’m not. Honesty is not a game. Political correctness is, and I’m not very good at it. So let the chips fall where they may. At least I got my progress report in on time. I hope that counts in my favor. Now I’m trying to remember how many other progress reports I have to fill out before I can get back to what I really am paid to do—work. 

Dissing others

I was recently out to dinner with a group of people (men and women) and was keenly aware of the different dynamics present at the table. In several instances it was almost as though one person knew that she could rile up another person simply by talking in a particular tone—call it condescending. Of course this got the other person riled up, and this other person is the type of person who responds angrily to perceived slights or insults. But from my perspective, they weren’t just perceived slights or insults—they were real. The woman was hacking away at this other person, under the guise of being an all-knowing and caring woman. She knew best, and she was being condescending. That doesn’t do much for me and it simply shows me that she doesn’t care about this other person at all. You don’t publicly humiliate another person as a pattern of behavior; yet I have seen a lot of this type of behavior at social gatherings. “You did what? Are you nuts? What’s wrong with you? God you must be crazy! I would never have done that. I never do such things.” Those sorts of comments, the type that are guaranteed to make the recipient feel small. You also have the other types of people, the ones who constantly criticize you or tell you that your way of thinking is wrong without making any attempt at all to understand where you are coming from. “No, you’re wrong. No, that’s not true. No, that’s not right.” I call it dissing. These people have their own agenda and their agenda is the correct agenda. In both cases, there is no acknowledgment of or respect for the other person’s situation or life, no acknowledgment that perhaps the other person has suffered or is struggling. These patterns of behavior are self-promoting and they come from a deep-seated lack of self confidence. If you have to make other people feel small in social situations in order to get attention and make yourself appear as though you’re the best thing ever, then it’s you and not the other person who has the real problem, in my humble opinion. And after this particular gathering, I thought of how much I would have rather spent the evening alone reading a good book instead of wasting time watching other people compete to be the center of attention over a dinner table.

I used to think that the best response to an insult or personal injury was to ’fight back’ in the best way one knew how—a snappy retort, an aggressive verbal response, or a real argument. It was important to defend yourself so that you didn’t appear ‘weak’. To be sure, these are fitting responses in some situations, especially when you feel threatened and the threat is real, e.g. someone really does want to hurt you or take his or her anger or rage out on you. But as I get older, I see that to respond with anger to a situation that makes you feel hurt and angry only adds fuel to the fire. Anger begets anger. The smarter approach is to smile and do nothing at all. If this response does nothing else, it will confuse those who are trying to hurt you. It may even make them angrier because they know that their behavior hasn’t gotten to you.  So this response is not a guaranteed method for defusing the situation. You may end up triggering the other party to harass you even more to try to drag you into a real argument. I have tried this a few times recently and I have to say that it’s much better than wearing your heart on your sleeve so that the world around you sees when you’ve been wounded. I am discovering that I want to move away from angry responses toward something different—wisdom, harmony, balance, peace. I don’t want to let anyone push me off my center; that’s happened often enough earlier in my life. There are some people who find your weak points, and when they do they exploit them if they want you to behave in a certain way. This has happened to me and others I know in work-related situations, but also in personal relationships. It’s easy to hone in on another’s weakness and exploit it if you decide to. But why would you want to if you really care about another person? If you have to go for the jugular each time there is the potential for an argument with another person, then you don’t really care about that person. Or if you always have to be right, or promote yourself at the expense of another, then you don’t really care about the other person at all. I am learning to identify liars, and there are quite a few of them in this life.

So perhaps the best thing when faced with such people is to smile, let go of the insult, and wish them well. After all, they have real problems of their own. But letting go of the insult and the hurt is the tricky part. How fast can a person learn to do that? That is the question and also the key to a more balanced harmonious life. If you give other people the power to control you by holding onto your hurt, you lose, because you use up an incredible amount of energy trying to deal with and retaliate against these people. And they are simply not worth the time or the energy involved.

Elizabeth Taylor 1932-2011

My first thought when I heard the news that Elizabeth Taylor had died was of my mother. She really liked her a lot as an actress and I know the news would have saddened her. We would have talked about her and about all the films that we liked that she had made. My thoughts go back to my teenage years, when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were an item, a huge item. If he bought her a big diamond ring, it was news. How much the ring cost was a major news story. If they argued, it was news. If they remarried after divorcing, it was news. My impression of her when I was young was that she was bigger than life, way bigger than life. She was a Movie Star, and I don’t think we will see the likes of her again. For lots of reasons, but perhaps the major one being that there is no one actress today that can match her talent, beauty, and goddess-quality, or her ability to maintain an aura of mystery about her. She had a bit of the Jackie-O mystery, but of course it must be said that she could have mystery in an era where even though people were desperate for news about her, there was still a chance to have a little mystery about you. That is almost not possible today. The news media have dissected my generation of actors, actresses and celebrities to the point where we know what kind of toothpaste they use. They have celebrity status but they are not gods or goddesses, at least not to me.

Elizabeth Taylor was stunning to look at, no matter what her age. She had gorgeous violet eyes and a perfect face, at any and all angles. I never tired of looking at her when she was in films. She was a beautiful child who turned into a beautiful woman. I admired her outer beauty the way I might a perfect thing of beauty--objectively, like I might admire a beautiful landscape, a painting, or a sculpture. Her beauty was sculpted--it defined her. If someone asked me for an example of a truly (outwardly) beautiful woman, I would have held her up as the example.

I have watched many of her films several times when they show up on TCM. The one I always come back to is BUtterfield 8. She poured herself into the role of the high-class call-girl and model who wants to change her life and it earned her an Oscar. I read somewhere that she did not want to make this film but that she was the consummate professional who did her best even though she didn’t want to do the film. I love this film and I’m not completely sure why. The storyline is trashy, the morality questionable, the ending predictable. But it was a vehicle for her acting—it allowed her to be so many things and she did them all well in that film. She rose above the film. The relationship with her mother in the film was touching, real, and even heartbreaking, for all of the things that remained unsaid between them. I have watched it numerous times and I always find something new in it each time—more nuances in her speech, new gestures, frowns, sadness, regret, desperation, and acceptance. Her face reflected them all and it made me wonder if this role reflected her own life in some way—that she wanted to get away from her existence as Movie Star and change her life. But she had to have realized how difficult that would be, hence the painful acceptance of life as it was. The other film I like is The Sandpiper, another morally-ambiguous film about a bohemian woman and single mother who falls in love with the married minister who runs the school her son attends. All sorts of heart-wrenching drama and tortured decisions ensue. You know how it will likely end. Nevertheless, you enjoy the ride on the way. It’s not a great movie, but it’s a good movie, a well-acted soap opera. It makes you want to get to know the characters. It made me want to get to know the long-suffering wife in this film (played by Eva Marie Saint) as well as in BUtterfield 8 (played by Dina Merrill). But these films weren’t about long-suffering wives. I cannot remember any film where Elizabeth Taylor played a passive long-suffering wife; in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof she was anything but passive despite being married to a man (Paul Newman in a great role) who ignored her, ditto for X, Y and Zee (another trashy film that just draws you in when you are watching it). In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, she gave as good as she got in one of the scariest onscreen portrayals ever of a dysfunctional marriage. She was not a woman who hung around waiting to be told what to do or waiting to be loved by a man, or so it seemed at least onscreen. I don’t know how she really lived her life off-screen, but the fact that she remarried Richard Burton after they divorced tells me that she had difficulty letting go of him and he of her. No matter. She will live on in her films and be remembered as the ‘last of an era’ in Hollywood when divas and goddesses reigned. 

Home renovations

We’ve all been there—home renovations—never-ending home renovations. You start on one room, and by the time that room is done, you see that it puts all the other rooms to shame. So then it’s time to start on the others too. One at a time, of course, or should I say unfortunately. Because one at a time means we’re looking at years of renovations ahead of us. That’s how it’s been for us since 2005; one bathroom underwent renovations in 2005, two bathrooms at the same time in 2007 (a re-renovation of the one done in 2005 was included), our kitchen in 2008, and the guest room and entrance hallway in 2009. When we renovated the first bathroom in 2005, it took several months because the electrically-warmed floor under the ceramic tiles had to be laid carefully and tested, and so on. And then came the decisions about what kind of shower to install, what sink looked best, and what types of tiles should be used for flooring and for the walls. The design part of it was fun, but I’m glad we didn’t have to do the work ourselves. As our luck would have it, our co-op decided that it would undertake a large bathroom renovation project in 2007 that started in January, and this meant that the newly-renovated bathroom was to be newly-renovated again in order to conform to co-op standards (standard design). Luckily for us, the bathroom renovations in our building (there are ten buildings in all) started in April so that our daily trip down to the provisional bathroom in the basement of our building was not an exercise in freezing to death on the way down and up again. Other co-op residents were not so lucky, especially those who lost their bathroom to renovations in mid-December. But it was no fun to lose two bathrooms at the same time, because we also lost our kitchen privileges since all water to the apartment was shut off. Most people in our building moved out to live with friends or family during the four to six weeks it took for the bathrooms to be finished, because all bathrooms in one apartment building were renovated at the same time because new water pipes had to be installed from basement to attic. We stayed put and roughed it—using the bathroom in the basement, getting water to cook and wash dishes from the faucet in the building’s hallway, and cooking on an electric hot plate or going out to eat. Every now and then I would go to my gym and train and shower there. On the plus side, we got to know all the workers, who took over all floors of the apartment building as they worked with their tools and materials, boom box radio blaring out rap and disco music as they worked.

We are now re-doing our dining room, and have removed several layers of wallpaper from the walls (some of which are brick) and all floor and ceiling moldings. We have help with most of the prep work from the same guys who helped us with previous renovations. So the walls have been stripped bare, the ceiling also, there is spackling of cracks and crevices, wall-papering, painting, gluing, you name it. I forget from one project to another just how much work is involved when you first start to work on a room and aim to do it thoroughly and correctly. There is dust everywhere, a fine white grit that wears its way into all wooden surfaces. We are eating dust, breathing dust, dusting dust, vacuuming dust. And if we ‘dust’ it all away it just settles again somewhere else. I keep telling myself that it’s worth it because the end result will look nice, but with each renovation project, I am ever more determined to never undertake another one. And in truth, we really only have one more room, our living room, and that doesn’t look too bad these days. I’ll live with it. I want my life back, I want all the different pieces of furniture returned to their rightful places, I don’t want to see layers of dust everywhere, and I don’t want to clean anymore. Mostly I don’t want to clean anymore.

Advice about writing from Cory Doctorow

An interesting article about how not to get distracted while writing by the writer Cory Doctorow. I tend to agree more with him than with Jonathan Franzen, if for no other reason than Cory's life seems to be more like my own, filled with interruptions and distractions at work (while I am doing my scientific writing) and filled with daily-life things when I am at home. I do as he does--I find at least a half hour each day to write--in most cases a blog post, but sometimes a poem or the beginning of an essay or a story. His philosophy of writing one page a day works for me. But he is remarkably productive as a full-time writer. I am just writing in my free hours outside of my regular job and manage one blog post per day or every other day. I wonder what it would be like to be a writer full-time. I'm betting there'd be lots of deadlines and that the occurrence of writer's block might hit more often than one would like. Writer's block has happened to me a few times this past year and it's not pleasant. It feels like everything has dried up and that there aren't any more ideas and that there never will be. Of course this is not true, but it feels that way when you are experiencing it. The best thing to do is to just relax and do something else--take a walk, read a book, watch a good movie, have a good conversation. In this way, your mind gets stimulated again and then it's possible to be in touch with some new ideas. There has to be inspiration. If you write, you cannot live in a vacuum, cannot seal yourself off from the rest of the world all the time. But it helps to have some alone time when you are actually writing and need quiet time. But some of my better poems have been written on subways, trains and buses, in the midst of throngs of people and lots of noise, because I was watching the life outside the windows go whizzing by and it triggered a thought which then triggered another thought. And so it goes......

Here is the link to Cory Doctorow's article:
http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html

Enjoy.

Saying goodbye to our Bimmer

I recently wrote a post about buying a used car but wanting a new car. Well, that time has now come. Our used car (from 1993) died this past week. Our wonderful comfortable 4-door automatic BMW that we bought in 2004--our Bimmer. BMWs are referred to as Bimmers, Beemers and Beamers. But according to Google, Bimmer is the correct term for BMW vehicles with 4 wheels (cars) while Beemer and Beamer are used for BMW vehicles with less than 4 wheels (e.g. motorcycles). What happened to our car is that the oil pan ruptured severely and in addition to a myriad of other repairs that had to be done (in order to pass the EU control) that would have cost us a fortune, we opted to sell it to a friend who has the equipment, time, space and patience to repair the car at leisure. We got some money for it so it worked out fine. But it was sad to say goodbye. It’s been such a great car and it’s taken us through Europe, to Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Austria and The Czech Republic. I’ll miss it. I had a special attachment to this car, maybe because it needed so few repairs in all the time we owned it. We’re going to buy a new (used) car but I doubt it will be as nice as this one was.  

Blind trust

We went to see the play Enron last weekend at Folketeateret and found it to be quite good. It had a lot to say about the complexities and vagaries of the human condition and the destruction of trust, as well as about our capacity for blind trust—in our workplaces, workplace leaders, friends and colleagues. Not only did workplace leaders assume that those who worked for them were behaving ethically and correctly, more importantly, employees also trusted their bosses with their hard-earned pension money. We know the outcome—money lost forever, pensions gone, lying, cheating, criminal behavior, and finally, prison for those who were responsible for this huge fiasco. I left the theater with mixed feelings about what had happened and what I had seen, but mostly with feelings of sadness. I found it so hard to believe that the company Enron could have done this to its employees. I also found it hard to believe that bosses could shut their eyes to what they knew was criminal behavior on the part of their employees. Why did they do this? And why did employees generally have so much trust in their company? And if I look a bit further, Bernie Madoff comes to mind. How did he manage to swindle hard-working intelligent people out of their life savings? Didn’t any of them have suspicions and strange gut feelings about his ‘winning streak’? Do we really all believe in ‘money for nothing’? Is there such a thing as a ‘free ride’? On the way out of the theater, an elderly Norwegian woman started to talk to me, and when she found out I was American, she was very interested in my opinion about the play. She was adamant about how Norwegian companies and the government were just as corrupt as American companies and the American government. I wondered about this—how easy it was for her to say this—and I wondered if she was just saying it to make me feel better about American corporate culture. But she wasn’t. She had clear meanings about what was going on in Norway, and she made me realize that we take a lot for granted, especially when there doesn’t seem to be any reason to dig deeper to look under the surface—to see what is really going on. Why don’t we dig deeper more often?

I bring this up after a conversation with a good friend about trust. Her issues regarding trust are not workplace-related, but she pointed out something that is general to all situations that arise when trust gets broken. What precede the breakdown are often laziness and a failure to pay attention on our parts. She admitted that this was the case for her situation. When I look back at my own life, to my own personal situations where trust got broken, I have to admit it was the same for me. Either that or I wanted to ignore what was really going on, probably because I did not want to deal with the particular situation at that particular time. But I know now that postponing such things only leads to huge explosions and life-changing occurrences. And you cannot go backward after them. You cannot return to naiveté, however much you’d like to. Defenses get stripped away, delusions get smashed, illusions also, and finally dreams. Dreams that your life was going to be this or that way, dreams that you’d live happily ever after with a spouse, dreams that you’d be wealthy or successful, dreams that you’d be friends forever with certain people or even with your own family. It turned out that life had other plans. The vagaries of life and of the behavior of those we let into our life, change our lives. They affect our dreams. And ultimately they change our ways of looking at trust.

Some of my friendships go back a long way, back to my childhood or teenage years. My closest women friends are my oldest friends. I also count some of the women I met early in my work life as very close friends. I love them in a way I could never adequately explain. I just ‘know’ that they have been there, are there, and will always be there for me, and I for them. I trust them with my heart, because they’ve earned my trust, and I’ve earned theirs. We had so much time together when we were young that we were able to talk deeply and intimately about the things that mattered to us, but it was done in a very natural way. We met for coffee and cake at a favorite diner, we went away on short vacations during the summer, we went to rock clubs and concerts, or simply went shopping and then out to eat. It didn’t have to be dramatic, the things we did. We lived normal lives, were there for each other when crises hit, knew each other’s families and friends, got to know each other’s neighborhoods, and eventually got to know each other’s spouses and families. There is something immensely comforting about that as I grow older. Whenever life gets tough, I think about my friends and I know I will be ok once I’ve had a chance to chat with them. This doesn’t diminish the relationship I have with my husband. He hasn’t known me as long as my closest women friends have. It’s a different kind of relationship, even though friendship is involved. It’s not possible to completely explain what marriage means, but it involves an intimate bond of trust between two people. He is another type of support system for me, and sometimes his responses to my personal crises are quite different than how my women friends would respond. It’s healthy to experience this—a well-rounded response. But I could never imagine my life without my women friends. My life would be much poorer without them. So I don’t understand those who give up their friends or who downplay the importance of their friendships once they get married. The bond of trust in marriage can be broken, and it is more often broken compared to friendships. Spouses are not predictable. Love is not predictable. Romantic love dies and often causes chaos when it does. It is the latter, the loss of romantic love, that is perhaps the most common personal crisis that happens to many people. All of us have been through it, married or not. We trust another with our heart, and that other person breaks our heart. It seems as though our heart will never mend, but it does, just not in the way we often think. Afterward, we wonder why we trusted that person or what we saw in that person. We question our judgment—why did we trust that person when he or she really was unreliable, irresponsible, untrustworthy, lazy, flirtatious, unfaithful, or a myriad of other things. The answer is that we could not know the future, and that we made the decision to trust based on our feelings and rational thoughts at the moment we made the decision. Maybe we were too young when we made the decision. But we made the decision to take the leap into an unknown future. We do that as well when we choose to have children. We cannot know how their lives will turn out. We cannot know if the world as we know it will still be there for them. We cannot protect them from the future. We have only the ‘now’. So we trust (blindly) that things will work out for the best, and for the most part, they do. But the ‘best’ can be defined in many ways. And we are always honing that definition. Despite the crises that hit us at times, we come through them and life goes on. But it is when the crises of trust hit that we are shaken, hurt, blindsided, angry, bewildered and despairing. Could we have seen them coming? Did we see them coming and choose to ignore the signals? How much could we have done to prevent them? A lot of the anger we feel is toward ourselves—why didn’t we pay more attention, why didn’t we confront more, challenge more, share more? It is often said that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Is becoming indifferent to a loved one or friend the beginning of the end of trust? When you no longer care to share yourself with a spouse or with a friend, or even with your children, you isolate yourself and pride can take root. Then we don’t always see what we should have seen, because we don’t ‘care’ anymore. But deep down maybe we still do.

All I know is that I have experienced losses of trust both personally and in my workplace during the past thirty years. They have been tough situations to navigate through. I don’t know if I did the best job with either one of them, but I emerged intact, if slightly the worse for wear. I would have preferred not to have experienced them, but they taught me valuable lessons. My eyes were opened. And they’ve stayed open. I don’t trust blindly anymore, at least not when faced with new people and new situations. I prefer to think of myself as healthily skeptical. I hope so, anyway. Christ said that we should be ‘ever vigilant’. I think I understand what that means now. We cannot be lazy. We cannot let others control us; we should not give others the capacity to own us completely, to destroy us, through their behavior and through our blind trust in them. It is true what has been said before, trust has to be earned. And it must continue to be earned, day in and day out. It cannot be taken for granted, and that is true for personal as well as workplace situations.  

Lighting candles in the darkness

I have a penchant for focusing on weakness and dissecting failure—not the weaknesses and failures of others, but my own. I don’t know where it comes from, but I have a suspicion that years of Catholic school education have done their job well. We were always told to take the splinter out of our eye first before we began to do the same with others. In other words, the exhortation was to examine our own failings first before finding them and trying to root them out of other people. So that’s what I do. Not on a daily or even weekly basis, but let’s say on a semi-annual or annual basis. I subject myself to a kind of evaluation period where I look at things that have gone well and/or badly. I assess the damage done, the repair work, as well as the construction work on new ideas and projects that catch my interest. Sometimes it all seems so futile, what I do or attempt to do. When I feel like that I know I am slipping into a down period, where I wonder what the point is of doing this or that. Why am I writing, why am I working, what is the meaning of my life? What are the goals and visions? Are they being realized? Am I making a difference? Am I lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness? Why do I make an effort at all? But the major question is—why do I feel this way at all? Why can’t I experience continual self-confidence and belief in myself? I guess the answer would be that if I did, I would lose the incentive to struggle, to rise, to compete, to continually improve myself. We are not nor will we ever reach perfection on this earth. The acknowledgment of failure is a corrective to a (long) winning streak. It reminds us that we cannot or should not take the winning streak for granted. Heck, we should not take anything for granted. What has happened in Japan is a huge reminder of that. I think it was the catastrophe in Japan that pushed me off center this time. I cannot shut out the suffering I see, even if I turn off the TV or don’t look at newspapers. How can you ignore what is going on there? It’s impossible. What happens is that I look at my own tiny little ventures and forays out into the big wide globally-oriented world and wonder why I am doing them at all, in the face of the overwhelming tragedy and catastrophe that I see. Some might say that this isn’t good and that I should not let it get to me personally. But how do you stop that from happening, and isn’t this trait exactly what makes me ‘me’? So I will be down for a while because other people are suffering and I feel so powerless. In that time I will use the time to think about how to be a better person—more involved, more caring and more positive. I will try to complain less and not be so me-focused. I will try to light more candles so that the darkness doesn’t overwhelm me and us. But that dichotomy between reaching out versus focusing on self is also what makes me ‘me’. We are all focused on our own lives and problems to a large degree. Given that fact, it is amazing that we reach out to help at all, but we do. We are always trying to be better people.  

Rules of writing according to Jonathan Franzen

I was surfing the internet the other day and I found these rules of writing if you want to be a writer. They made a lot of sense and it’s not hard to imagine that Franzen (a best-selling author) wrote them because he also has experienced the problems associated with not following them. So I am posting them here as guidelines—for myself and other budding writers. The biggest problem with sitting and writing is to do just that—to sit and write. And not get distracted—by the ping of your email box as it accepts a new email or by the urge to visit all the social media sites that your emails continually inform you about--that so-and-so has posted this or that on his or her wall. It is SO easy to get distracted. So #8 for me makes a lot of sense, followed by #2.

1.       The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

2.       Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.

3.       Never use the word “then” as a conjunction– we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.

4.       Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.

5.       When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

6.       The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto biographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.

7.       You see more sitting still than chasing after.

8.       It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

9.       Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

10.   You have to love before you can be relentless.

On the tragedy in Japan

Henry Scott Holland (1847-1918) was professor of divinity at the University of Oxford and the canon of Christ Church in Oxford. He wrote “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”

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It is hard to imagine writing this and feeling its truth. When we watch TV these days and see how many people have perished or are missing in Japan, we know that death is something, not nothing at all. But these words were written by Holland to comfort loved ones, who needed to hear that their departed loved ones were not really so far away from them, just in another ‘room’. And if it was possible to keep life as normal as possible, then it was possible not to miss the departed so much because they were really still with us. My thoughts tonight go out to the Japanese people. I cannot shake the images that I have seen on TV. I also saw that the film Hereafter was pulled from Japanese theaters. I am glad, because that film opens with a horrific tsunami. I have written about this film in another post. It’s hard not to ponder death, the meaning of death, the horror of death as Japan has experienced. Why do so many people have to die in this way? It is not possible to ignore the suffering, the tragedy, the sheer overwhelming feeling of helplessness. How does one help? Is it best to pray? Send money? Hope for the best? What is the best in the face of this kind of destruction? If the nuclear reactors experience meltdown, what then? Suddenly out of nowhere, tragedy strikes. That is how tragedy operates. Earthquake, tsunami, meltdown? Life-changing events. Lives changed forever. There but for the grace of God go we, an old expression that means that it could have been us given other circumstances but that God’s grace spared us. Why didn’t it spare the Japanese people? It’s hard to understand this. It’s hard to understand the immensity of this type of suffering. It’s hard not to get overwhelmed. But it’s important not to because we must be ready to help, at any time. I admire the soldiers and all the medical personnel who are helping in the search for survivors. They are heroes. I just hope they survive the trauma of what they see and deal with. And mostly I hope that the Japanese children find some sort of solace—it must be terrifying for them to see what is happening around them and not to understand it. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make it all go away for them. I wish that so intensely.  

Nowhere to run to

And so it happened again, a major earthquake that generated a devastating tsunami—this time off the coast of northeast Japan. The horrific images of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that rolled in over Thailand and Indonesia are still vivid in my memory. This quake in Japan was a major one—a magnitude of 8.9 on the Richter scale is being reported, and that is scary enough. Just as disturbing are the video footages of the tsunami sweeping across coastal farmland carrying boats, cars and burning houses in its wake. Other videos show submerged cars and boats being pushed toward a highway overpass, and it is both terrifying and amazing to see how boat masts are just crushed like plastic toys. I watch such scenes and cannot help but think of the Mayan prophecy that says that the world will end in 2012 (more precisely, the Mayan calendar ends on the Gregorian calendar date of December 21, 2012 which has led to intense speculation about what this means for the planet). And if you have seen the film 2012 (not very good except for the special effects for earthquake scenes and subsequent destruction) you will understand that there really is nowhere to run when these types of things happen, because there is usually very little warning. I am glad that we do not live in a geographical area that is prone to earthquakes. My thoughts go to the Japanese people—I hope and pray that there will not be a huge loss of life as there was in Indonesia.

The power and fury of nature and of water never cease to amaze me. I just wrote about the Akerselva river and how its fish and insect life died in the space of one night due to a chemical spill. But the river itself keeps running down to the sea and hopefully always will. Back in November 2000, unusually large amounts of rainfall in Oslo resulted in extremely high water levels in the Akerselva that threatened to flood surrounding areas. We live about a five-minutes’ walk from the river, at a point where there are small waterfalls. When we opened our apartment windows facing toward the river, we could hear the river as it roared past. We joined many others who stood watching from a safe distance as this ordinarily peaceful river roared mightily past us. The spray from these falls was so intense as to take your breath away. I have never seen so many people out late in the evening, watching the river, photographing and filming its wildness. We are drawn to that which scares us. We watch even though we don’t want to. Even in the current video footage from Japan, there are motorists on the highway overpass who got out of their cars to see what was going on, in spite of the huge danger. I would like to think that I would have floored my car and sped off. But who knows, perhaps it was smartest to stay on the overpass bridge. It seemed to be made of solid cement and to be able to withstand the onslaught of the ocean water, and it was not submerged, at least not at the time point that the video footage was shot. I hope so anyway. The tanker truck that stopped on the bridge remained there. Perhaps the driver understood that there was nowhere to go. That must be the scariest thought of all—that there is nowhere to go, nowhere to run to. The digital age, with the ability to send live footage in the space of a few seconds via iPhones and cell phones generally has brought with it the possibility of literally stepping into another person’s shoes, for better or for worse. We know how they must feel. We see how horrific it is and know what they face. Nowhere to run to—a sobering thought that pulls us out of ourselves for some minutes and makes us see what is happening elsewhere. We are forced to face our mortality. And it is not war but nature that does this to us. 

Some wise words about rivers

I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars. — (Edward Abbey)

And I count myself more fortunate with each passing season to have recourse to these quiet, tree-strewn, untrimmed acres by the water. I would think it a sad commentary on the quality of American life if, with our pecuniary and natural abundance, we could not secure for our generation and those to come the existence of . . . a substantial remnant of a once great endowment of wild and scenic rivers. — (William Anderson, Congressman from Tennessee, Arguing for passage of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968))

Sit by a river. Find peace and meaning in the rhythm of the lifeblood of the Earth. — (Anonymous)

Boundaries don't protect rivers, people do. — (Brad Arrowsmith, Landowner along the Niobrara National Scenic River, Nebraska)

The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare to let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure. — (Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah)

Wild rivers are earth's renegades, defying gravity, dancing to their own tunes, resisting the authority of humans, always chipping away, and eventually always winning. — (Richard Bangs, River Gods)

When protected, rivers serve as visible symbols of the care we take as temporary inhabitants and full-time stewards of a living, profoundly beautiful heritage of nature. — (John Echeverria, Pope Barrow, Richard Roos Collins, Rivers at Risk: The Concerned Citizen's Guide to Hydropower)

Choosing to save a river is more often an act of passion than of careful calculation. You make the choice because the river has touched your life in an intimate and irreversible way, because you are unwilling to accept its loss. — (David Bolling, How to Save a River: Handbook for Citizen Action)

Any river is really the summation of the whole valley. To think of it as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part. — (Hal Borland, This Hill, This Valley)

What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn't have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn't want to go anywhere else. — (Hal Boyle)

There are many ways to salvation, and one of them is to follow a river. — (David Brower, Foreword to Oregon Rivers by Larry Olson and John Daniel)

You don't need it, but will you take some advice from a Californian who's been around for a while? Cherish these rivers. Witness for them. Enjoy their unimprovable purpose as you sense it, and let those rivers that you never visit comfort you with the assurance that they are there, doing wonderfully what they have always done. — (David Brower, Foreword to Oregon Rivers by Larry Olson and John Daniel)

Keep your rivers flowing as they will, and you will continue to know the most important of all freedoms—the boundless scope of the human mind to contemplate wonders, and to begin to understand their meaning. — (David Brower, The Foreword to Oregon Rivers by Larry Olson and John Daniel)

The song of the river ends not at her banks but in the hearts of those who have loved her. — (Buffalo Joe)

The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it. — (Chinese philosopher)

We call upon the waters that rim the earth, horizon to horizon, that flow in our rivers and streams, that fall upon our gardens and fields, and we ask that they teach us and show us the way. — (Chinook Blessing Litany)

In a country where nature has been so lavish and where we have been so spend-thrift of indigenous beauty, to set aside a few rivers in their natural state should be considered an obligation. — (Senator Frank Church from Idaho, Arguing for passage of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968))

In spite of the durability of rock-walled canyons and the surging power of cataracting water, the wild river is a fragile thing—the most fragile portion of the wilderness country. — (John Craighead, Biologist and one of the architects of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act)

The river called. The call is the thundering rumble of distant rapids, the intimate roar of white water . . . a primeval summons to primordial values. — (John Craighead, Naturalist Magazine (Autumn 1965))

A river is the coziest of friends. You must love it and live with it before you can know it. — (G.W. Curtis, Lotus Eating: Hudson and Rhine)

We don't tend to ask where a lake comes from. It lies before us, contained and complete, tantalizing in its depth but not its origin. A river is a different kind of mystery, a mystery of distance and becoming, a mystery of source. Touch its fluent body and you touch far places. You touch a story that must end somewhere but cannot stop telling itself, a story that is always just beginning. — (John Daniel, Oregon Rivers)

If you grew up in the country, chances are you have fond memories of lazy days down by a river, creek or pond. — (Darlene Donaldson, "The River" in Country Magazine)

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop . . . is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again. — (Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, The Universe, Home)

I stand by the river and I know that it has been here yesterday and will be here tomorrow and that therefore, since I am part of its pattern today, I also belong to all its yesterdays and will be a part of all its tomorrows. This is a kind of earthly immortality, a kinship with rivers and hills and rocks, with all things and all creatures that have ever lived or ever will live or have their being on the earth. It is my assurance of an orderly continuity in the great design of the universe. — (Virginia Eifert)

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. — (Loren Eiseley, "Four Quartets," in The Immense Journey)

Some words from Hans Børli about rivers

"Lytter du lenge til elvene om natta, lenge, er det til slutt som om sjelen gåtefullt minnes sin framtid"

(If you listen to the rivers for a long time at night, a long time, eventually it is as though your soul will mysteriously remember its past).

Hans Børli, Dagene